MNSURE, Minnesota’s Exchange, recently placed a premium calculator online to estimate the cost of Exchange coverage. Middle income families and individuals that choose government exchange coverage will have to think twice before accepting a raise or choosing to work.

The Minnesota healthcare exchange is not a marketplace. It is not, as some have called it, a “one-stop-shopping” place for health insurance or “Travelocity.” The MN Exchange, being built under DFL Governor Mark Dayton’s executive order, and now advancing through legislation, has been called the “Minnesota Insurance Marketplace.”

The $41 million contract between Maximus, Inc. and the State of Minnesota for the development of an ACA-compliant health insurance exchange includes several exhibits. EXHIBIT D is focused on data-sharing. The data to be shared by the State with the corporation is extensive. Maximus will create an Exchange that allows individual data to be shared with at least five federal agencies through the "federal data services hub."

Although there is no state legislative authority to create a government health insurance exchange as prescribed by Obamacare, the administration of Governor Mark Dayton is pushing forward using federal dollars to design and develop it. During the public comment (open mike) period of the first meeting of the MN Health Insurance Exchange Advisory Task Force, the Commissioner of Commerce refused to give CCHF's president a "yes" or "no" answer to her question about legislative authority.

The Record Locator Service is part of a Health Information Exchange. When a patient's medical records are requested, the RLS moves out onto the network to find all medical records of that individual. Some states have patient consent requirements. Other states have none.

Minnesota citizens filled a meeting room front to back at the Minnesota Department of Health to provide input and comment on the Department’s plan to claim ownership of private medical records data, send the data to a data warehouse in Maine, and use the data rank physicians and hospitals according to the Department’s definition of “quality.” Insurers will then be required by law to steer patients to only those providers who rank as “high quality, low cost.”

Specifically, a Tennessen Warning requirement [to tell individual how their data would be used by the Dept., whether they have to provide it, etc.] would not be workable for the reporting of communicable diseases or related specimens or for the collection of many other types of public health data or specimens. There may be other privacy protections or some sort of modified Tennessen Warning, but they would have to be tailored to balance MDH's responsibility to protect public health with the individual's privacy. The goal would be to maximize public health protections while minimizing any intrusion on personal privacy.

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Health Privacy Alert!

HIPAA DOES NOT PROTECT PRIVACY... AND YOU ARENOT REQUIRED TO SIGN HIPAA "PRIVACY" FORMS

By federal law, you are not required to sign the clinic or hospital HIPAA "Privacy" form (or the Acknowledgement of the Notice of Privacy Practices embedded in consent forms)...even if the clinic tries to insist that you must. The form has nothing to do with...